I’m imagining that the year is 2347. My great-great-great-great granddaughter is Olivia Levy-Collins. She’s in her mid-thirties. After reading my only moderately successful manuscript on the history of American narcissism as a preteen, she becomes interested in the social sciences. A resident of Africa’s southern cone, Olivia does her undergrad at the University of Botswana, double majoring in Archaeology and Ecology. She goes off to the world-renown Universidade de São Paulo (University of São Paulo) in the Brazilian zone, where she earns her master’s degree in Western Civilization (with a focus on 20th and 21st-century American history), and a doctorate in cultural anthropology, with a focus on historical social psychology.

Olivia does her dissertation on the causes of the collapse of the Western world. This is not a new topic in the 24th-century world. Every one of the six billion people on the planet knows the broad story. How, after centuries of dominance, the economic and political structures of Western Europe and the United States underwent long-term decline in the midst of growing economic inequality, continued oppression of already vulnerable groups, undue influence of corporations on governance, and climate change beyond their abilities to comprehend. The proxy wars with terrorism and quasi-nation-states that later led to right-wing revolutions within Europe and the US. The full-blown civil wars and climate degradation that followed.

The US destroyed itself, as anarchists launched a cyberattack that took out the one-time superpower’s entire electrical grid. The groups once known as White supremacists retaliated, and used stolen nuclear weapons on six US cities, including the capital, Washington, DC, to take out the cyberterrorists, most of whom had been rumored to be Arab Muslim and Latina. The riots, famine, starvation, and consequences of climate change ensued, and ensured that the US would not be ever again. Europe also went through many of these convolutions. If it were not for the collective work of scientists in Brazil, India, China, Canada, and Southern Africa to remove the buildup of carbon dioxide and methane gases from the atmosphere and oceans, full-blown nuclear war may have occurred.

Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope from Scandal, a show about damage control, controlling the narrative, September 15, 2011. (http://scandal.wikia.com).

Olivia, though, like a new generation of her colleagues, wanted to understand what would cause people from the most powerful nations on the planet to collectively lose their minds. Why would they, after overwhelming success to subdue the earth, then turn on each other to kill the very things that gave them enormous power in the first place? My book from so many generations ago gave Olivia one possible clue. She found my book on the shelf of an ancient library in Walvis Bay, in the country that used to be Namibia. It was part of a school trip that Olivia was a part of while in primary school, to give students an appreciation for ancient attempts to preserve knowledge in depositories for books made of wood pulp, glue, and toner ink. She’d heard about the book from her great-grandmother, who had heard about it from her grandmother. The latter whom had read the book numerous times, as my son had moved his family from the US to South Africa as the occasional American unrests turned deadlier in the mid-21st century.

But, even after that field trip, even after getting her mother to get her a rare electronic copy of my book from the United Nations’ central archives in Aleppo, even after reading it, Olivia didn’t fully believe it. She couldn’t comprehend a culture that would waste vast quantities of natural resources, including human ones. She’s didn’t understand how a society in which everyone thought that becoming wealthy was their birthright could possibly function. She didn’t get how a nation as powerful as the US was always so fragile as an idea, not to mention in actuality.

Olivia’s dissertation work took her to the abandoned city of New York in 2347. With the exception of its crumbling skyscrapers, most of the city was covered by tens of meters of dirt (some of which remained radioactive). Other parts, like the area once known as Wall Street and Battery Park in Manhattan, or Park Slope in Brooklyn, were also partly underwater. She and her fellow group of two-dozen anthropologists, archaeologists, and other scientists, descended on the abandoned city, along with military commandos, all trained to expect the unexpected. In the case of the military, their training included scenarios for exploring exoplanets, which many saw as less dangerous than the exploration of a relatively recently dead civilization.

They went to two sites to conduct their studies. One, the New York Public Library on West 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. The other, two hundred meters away, was this recently excavated place in the old city, something the world once called Times Square. Olivia’s team explored the unearthed library, or at least, what was left of it. Fighting, flooding, dirt, and earth had left the main branch of one of the largest libraries in the Western world a shell of itself. It did have books and other collections still. Mostly self-help books, political memoirs, and recordings of one of the last US presidents, Donald J. Trump.

Olivia, though, unlike her younger counterparts, knew that as self-centered as the remaining collection appeared, it wasn’t the whole story. She knew from my book and from the other books of the 20th and 21st centuries that there were numerous intellectuals and writers who tried to warn the world that the facade of narcissism would lead billions to their deaths. That cannibalizing selfishness could even possibly destroy the world, certainly the Western world.

But she did find it interesting that after the fall of the West, in one of its greatest cities, only the most narcissistic of preserved materials remained. It told her one thing. The narcissism was real, that millions had fallen prey to it. That in an age in which the world didn’t have the technology to use energy-matter converters to replicate food, clothing, shelter, and medicine for 7.3 billion people, millions once lived as if there was no tomorrow, like life was one big party. To the point where these Westerners made significantly more copies of their homages to themselves than they did of anything else.

So Olivia took this knowledge, and the knowledge gained from the Times Square dig. She titled her dissertation, “How Western Civilization Cannibalized Itself: Reproduction, Capitalism, and Narcissism, 1750-2100.” That same year, Olivia turned it into a book, an interplanetary must-read, Runaway Narcissism and How the Sun Set on the Western World. It raised lots of questions about how humanity overcame its own narcissism, but at great cost. It would be one of the great books of the 24th century. That’s my Olivia!

This week marks thirty-three years since my first days in the gifted-track Humanities Program, a fairly diverse group of very smart and (some) pretty creative students. Despite the common refrain among administrators of this long-gone program, me and my Humanities classmates weren’t the “crème de la crème” when it came to critical or independent thinking. In recent years, I’ve learned that their views on politics, religion, sports, entertainment, family and so many other things are so typically and sadly American.

Since the creators’ premise for the Humanities Program was to develop the whole person, and not just academic success, it seems to me that the program failed in terms of providing a holistic education. That our parents and other authority figures helped shape the opinions and beliefs we take to adulthood is part of my observation here. The disappointing part for me, though, has been the fact that these opinions have gone unadulterated over the past twenty-five or thirty years.

This isn’t an indictment of everyone I’ve ever known from Mount Vernon, New York, or from Mount Vernon public schools, or from MVHS, or even from my Humanities years. There are more than a few individuals who I am so glad to have reconnected with in person or through Facebook, Twitter and WordPress in the past decade or so. Everyone has the right to their beliefs, their ignorance, their opinions, however ill-informed or illogical. But there are consequences to never challenging one’s own beliefs, ignorance and opinions. Consequences that include victim-blaming, xenophobia, religion-as-politics, respectability politics, jingoist hyper-patriotism and colorblind racism.

What I’ve observed over the past ten or eleven years is that, when taken as a whole, it seems that I grew up around and reconnected with a group whose beliefs and opinions differ so much from my own. So much so that it really strains my memory to think that I grew up there. As my wife said to me on her first visit to Mount Vernon in Christmas ’99, after seeing a burned out Mazda smack-dab in the middle of downtown, “You sure you weren’t adopted?”

You Can’t Go Home Again to a Place That Was Never Home

I suspected some stark differences by the time I started working on Boy @ The Window in earnest in ’06. Any number of the ex-classmates I interviewed expressed opinions that I’d heard long before about “illegals,” about how Mount Vernon was some sort of middle-class haven, about our Humanities class being a faux “Benetton commercial” or a “mini-Fame.”

These were the kinds of opinions I remembered hearing from their parents and our teachers back in the ’80s. The sense of paternalism and entitlement, or the sense that MVHS was dangerous or “a jungle” or full of “animals.” It reminded me that there were many classmates who I’d met in seventh grade who’d transfer to private or parochial school or had enrolled in “better” schools in other districts by tenth grade because their parents were terrified by the so-called dangers of a mostly Black and Latino high school, with poverty and criminality being the unspoken words here.

I’ve faced off with the son of our late former principal Richard Capozzola several times on my blog and on Facebook in the past three years over this very issue, of how MVHS was run like a prison-prep program. His rationale for justifying Capozzola’s anti-Black draconian policies at MVHS consisted of “my dad was a great dad” and that I “wouldn’t have survived a day” at MVHS without his father as principal. The frame of MVHS as a war-zone or prison with students of color assumed to be criminals within this frame, this son of Capozzola couldn’t recognize even if Spock did a mind-meld to give him a dose of the Black experience.

Uncritical Melody, On Mount Vernon and the World

Neil DiCarlo, ex-classmate, right-winger, and one-time candidate for NY State Senate out of Putnam Valley, October 15, 2012. (http://archive.lohud.com/).

My observations aren’t limited to race or MVHS per se. Among my former classmates, with everything from affirmative action to Zionism, from political parties to education reform, from immigration reform to religious diversity, so many have views that range from conservative to right-wing. For some, every question can be answered with Leviticus or Ephesians, and any disagreement with a condemnation to Hell. For others, the frame for these issues are a “both sides do it” or “let’s look at both sides.” As if any issue involving climate change or social injustice is an algebraic equation, as if these issues are about finding some preposterous balance, rather than about exploitation or oppression.

But where I’ve found myself most at odds with some of my ex-classmates is the very issue of Mount Vernon itself as a city or a nurturing environment. It’s not as if I’ve never acknowledged the reality that if one didn’t grow up in poverty, or had connections to city politics, church or community leaders, or at least thirty cousins within a mile of your domicile, that Mount Vernon was a pretty good place to grow up. It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t for many people I grew up around.

Yet time and again, as I’ve told my story here and as I began to put Boy @ The Window together between ’06 and ’11, some of my former classmates and a couple of my former neighbors have opined that I have an ax to grind. Yeah, actually, I do, but not about Mount Vernon per se. About the poverty, abuse and ostracism I experienced growing up there, that shaped my experiences there, that authority figures often ignored. In those things, I do have a point that I have and will continue to hammer away at with the sledgehammer I have at my disposal. Too often, my former classmates believe that the only Mount Vernon that should be on public display is the one that emphasizes their raceless or supercool middle-class experience.

Some of My Classmates = Conservative America

Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope from Scandal, a show about damage control, controlling the narrative, September 15, 2011. (http://scandal.wikia.com).

Even in this, there’s a conservative perspective. One that says, “don’t rock the boat, don’t express a perspective that’s different than the narrative we want to put out to the world.” I know from experience and as an educator that sweeping truth into a dustbin and expressing only acceptable opinions — or acting as if all opinions, when expressed respectfully, are equal to each other — hurts us all, but especially those who are shut out of the conversation. I wish that so many of my ex-classmates had learned this while growing up in Mount Vernon, while in Mount Vernon public schools, while in Humanities with me.

I’ve come around to Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough’s way of thinking. America is a center-right nation, just as the Founding Fathers intended. Or, to be most precise, America’s DNA is one that has always had the “this-is-a-heterosexual-White-man’s-country” mutation baked into it, a gene that morphs to the point of virtual immutability. A fair number of my ex-classmates also have this mutation, which may explain my inability to fit in more than my kufi, Hebrew-Israelite status, or living at 616 in the midst of poverty domestic violence and child abuse.

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: